May 06, 2011

Kirk says Pakistanis 'probably fully aware' where bin Laden was

Republican U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk said today that the Pakistani government was “probably fully aware” that Osama bin Laden had been living in the country and that other top terrorists are currently there as well.

Despite that, Kirk said he disagreed with cutting off U.S. aid to Pakistan.

“I think that calls to cut off all aid to Pakistan are short-sighted because most of the supplies for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan come through Pakistan and if we declare a diplomatic war on Pakistan, you would immediately have problems feeding the Army in Afghanistan,” said Kirk, who also is a Navy Reserve intelligence officer.

Illinois' junior senator made his remarks while meeting with the Tribune editorial board after returning from a fact-finding mission in Somalia.

Some in Congress have called for a cut in aid to Pakistan in the aftermath of the killing of bin Laden by U.S. special operation forces on Sunday. The calls came after details emerged that the al-Qaeda leader and mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the U.S. had been living in a palatial fortified residence not far from Pakistan’s capital city for as long as six years.

Citing what he called a “50-year history” of using terrorism “to keep India off balance,” Kirk said a significant part of Pakistan’s population and government support terrorism, including its intelligence service.

“I think the Pakistanis probably were fully aware that (bin Laden) was probably in their country and the statements by (former Pakistan President Gen. Pervez) Musharraf were disingenuous at best,” Kirk said, though he questioned whether Pakistan “tactically” knew an exact location.

Musharraf, who stepped down in 2008, has said that when he was president he never knew where bin Laden was. Today, in an interview with National Public Radio, Musharraf said if bin Laden had been living in Abbottabad, Pakistan, for five or six years, near a major military installation, the lack of intelligence would have been due to “complicity” or “incompetence and I strongly believe in the latter.”

“I cannot imagine that there was complicity,” Musharraf said.

Kirk also said he believed that bin Laden’s heir-apparent in running al-Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri, and the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammed Omar, also are living in Pakistan. The senator noted they had been behind bin Laden as the number two and three “High Value Targets” in the U.S. fight against terrorism.

“I think the government of Pakistan generally knows No. 2 and No. 3 are also in Pakistan,” Kirk said, though again he said the government may not know the specific location of al Zawahiri and Omar.

Kirk’s comments echo those of Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who told ABC News he believed Pakistan knew of bin Laden’s whereabouts and that he had “no doubt” it knows the location of other top terrorists.

Closer to home, Kirk said an uptick in the nation’s unemployment rate to 9 percent from 8.8 percent after the level had gradually been dropping would shift attention from bin Laden and international terrorism back to the economy.

“As far as the news cycle is concerned, that announcement this morning is the beginning of the end of the bin Laden story and now we’re going to return back to gas prices,” Kirk said. “An increase in joblessness is a huge reversal for the White House. Exactly as it gets its campaign rolling, it doesn’t want that. This will shift Washington pretty quickly next week in my view.”

As for his overseas trip, Kirk said he believed U.S. forces should look at battling Somalia’s al-Qaeda terrorism satellite, running piracy missions in the Indian Ocean, as more important that al-Qaeda operations in Yemen.

He said he would meet next week with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to discuss a bipartisan push for more aggressive action against the al Shabaab terrorism group.

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